Archive for the 'Search' Category

Musipedia: search music by whistling

Thursday, December 15th, 2005

With Musipedia you can use this applet to translate the whistle into Pasons Code and search the database for matching tunes.

Parsons Code is a neat way of encoding melodies:

Each pair of consecutive notes is coded as “U” (”up”) if the second note is higher than the first note, “R” (”repeat”) if the pitches are equal, […]

Google Maps API

Wednesday, June 29th, 2005

Google has released a Google Maps API.

Google Earth

Tuesday, June 28th, 2005

Google has officially launched the Google Earth beta. I’ve been playing with it for a little while and it’s an extremely cool application. 3D terrain, on-map roads, restaurants and hotels. It’s like Google Maps on steroids. Best of all, there’s a free version that basically does everything a normal user would […]

Census data on Google Maps

Tuesday, June 21st, 2005

gCensus is a new Google Maps derivative by the author of DRM Blog that displays Census data from 2000. from BB

There’s also a slashdot discussion on Google’s 3D maps.

Libraries should do browse, not search

Thursday, May 19th, 2005

From Eric Hellman of Openly:
I think that libraries should consider returning to their historic roots that have nothing to do with “search”.Forget search- a billion dollars says that Google and Amazon will do search way better than any real library on the planet, and libraries can now leverage these searching capabilities in very real ways.

What […]

Mental Models for Search

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

Jakob Nielsen writes:
Summary:
Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing.

Search is such a prominent part of the Web user experience that users have developed a firm mental model for how it’s supposed to […]

The library as a web app

Friday, May 6th, 2005

On Web4Lib list yesterday Bernie Sloan posted a March Library Journal article by WebFeat president Todd Miller on why libraries should be simple like Google. Tom Miller is eloquently saying what many other have also said: the library web tools aren’t working. Users don’t like them and don’t want to use them. […]

Google adding quality factor to news ranking

Thursday, May 5th, 2005

New Scientist reports that Google has filed for patents related to adding authority as a factor in Google News rankings.

Academic libraries in a Google environment

Friday, April 29th, 2005

In the latest Cites & Insights, Joy Weese Moll put together a nice overview of a presentation on Google’s library-related endeavors given at the ACRL conference.

More Google Maps hacks and creative uses

Wednesday, April 20th, 2005

Battelle on Google Keyhole Integration Update
Memorymaps
myGmaps enables you to create, save and host custom data files and display them with Google Maps.
Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets
Google Maps Standalone Mode
housingmaps.com powered by craigslist and google maps

Freedom to tag

Thursday, April 14th, 2005

Steven Cohen posts critically about authors tagging their own work.
I’ve noticed that quite a few bloggers have been tagging their own blog posts on del.icio.us. My belly barometer goes off when I see this. It just doesn’t seem right to me. I find it counter-intuitive to the collective knowledge base. It also seems a bit […]

Google Q&A

Thursday, April 7th, 2005

Google has introduced a new Q&A service that puts facts related to searches in OneBox instertions. In an example noted in the Macworld article, a search for Portugal population returns the answer mined from the CIA’s World Factbook. More details on the service and how it fits into the world of search can […]

Google Maps gets satellite imagery

Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

And it works just like the rest of the service. Zooming in, it appears to be 1m resolution and I see a couple dots that look like people. While this ability has been there with other services, integration with Maps makes it very pleasant to use. They’ve also incorporated world-wide imagery, but […]

How Yahoo! is making a comeback

Monday, March 28th, 2005

The run-down by Om Malik

Taking a critical look at tagging

Friday, March 25th, 2005

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has a blog post taking a critical look at tagging and the history of web metadata attempts. He notes that metadata has largely been useless and overly complicated for use in the overall web and argues that tagging has the same problems, one major problem being the lack […]

Harvard-Google Project Faces Copyright Woes

Thursday, March 24th, 2005

Excerpt:
Three months after undertaking an ambitious project to digitize thousands of books, Harvard University Library (HUL) and the Google Print project are facing scrutiny from publishing organizations, who claim the project may infringe copyright law.
Read on @ the Havard Crimson Online

Bibliotheke Findory neighbors

Saturday, March 19th, 2005

The Findory neighborhood for Bibliotheke shows all of the related blogs on Findory and represents their relative ‘connectedness’ through size and shading.

Findory itself is pretty cool. As you read articles or blog posts it changes the ranking of other articles, thus personalizing the interface by giving you stories according to your past reading.

Google Code

Thursday, March 17th, 2005

Google is now strongly backing developers and open source with Google Code. Nice to see that the code is also hosted on SourceForge. There’s also an Updates from code.google.com blog over at blogger.

Butler Firefox Google enhancer

Monday, March 14th, 2005

What it does:

removes ads on most Google pages
fixes fonts on most Google pages
Google web search:

adds links to other search sites (”Try your search on…”)
in news results, adds links to other news sites
in movie results, adds links to other movie sites
in weather results, adds links to other weather sites
in product results, adds links to other product […]

Open WorldCat deep links tutorial

Monday, March 14th, 2005

Catalogablog notes that the Open WorldCat deep linking tutorial has been updated. By setting your library up in the system, users will be able to see your holdings when a Yahoo! or Google search matches something in the WorldCat database. See the OCLC Open WorldCat page for more info.